LeTipex, replace neo-Nazi with a commie in your rant and think about it. And then try replacing it with a Muslim or Jew and think some more.
... what?
First, comparing Nazis with adherents to a certain religion is... to put it
fucking lightly... a false equivalence. An incredibly widespread, noxious and identifiable false equivalence that I frankly didn't expect you to use so frivolously. I know that Even Then already brought up the subject, but I started writing my reply before he posted his. Besides, I am taking your answer as a massive goalpost shift from "this is morally wrong because the exact same could be said about innocent groups" to "we should avoid this strategy because it legitimizes those who use it against innocent groups under false pretenses". So, yeah, correct me if I am wrong, but I feel it bears repeating, and in any case, I really hope I don't need to elaborate on that.
Second, while the comparison with "commies" is certainly more defensible, I'm starting to wonder if we are really talking about the same "neo-Nazis" here. In fact, a lot of disagreements and incomprehensions on the subject seem to be stemming from this confusion, so let's do away with the "neo" prefixes and talk, very broadly, about small-f fascism and capital-N Nazism in Trump's America. Spencer is a Nazi ; not only does he adhere to a fascist worldview, he is a white nationalist who openly advocates for genocide, segregation, and mass deportation of citizens, particularly along racial lines. Meanwhile, demagogues like Bannon or Yiannopoulos represent a more garden-variety brand of fascism that certainly likes to
flirt with these subjects (muh political correctness), but ultimately shy away from endorsing them as long as they remain too unpopular. There is a lot that could be said about the
connections between the two, but I won't elaborate on that. To borrow your comparison, it's a bit like the distinction between your average Marxist-Leninist in semi-denial about the historical failings of his ideology, and a self-aware Tankie who would happily repeat them. Or between the Religious Right and outright theocratic dominionism, though it does
not follow that Trump is "basically like Bush".
Third, to back up my previous points, replace neo-Nazi with Sharia-enforcing islamist fanatics, and all of a sudden LeTipex's message seems incredibly tame, even for a leftist. Some would even say it borders on apologism in its reticence towards tracking those who privately hold jihadist beliefs. Before getting on our high horses about the way we must deal with those poor misguided souls that ~look and act so much like us~ maybe we should consider the way we treat and think about the socially-acceptable exotic bogeymen du jour.
I'm not trying to single out Askold or score a rhetorical point against him here, he's not my "opponent" in some make-believe word-fight, this shit is actually serious. Everyone should spend some time to think about their moral standards, where they lay regarding obedience to legal authority, the use of violence to fight against oppressive ideologies, and whether those standards apply differently to people further from you in terms of race, culture, nationality, monkeysphere, and so on. I don't expect everyone to come to the same conclusions as me, but that's very much not the point.
Of course. More specifically, though, it basically grew out of /pol/, who modeled it after a mixture of /b/ and LessWrong. FSTDT is also closely related to LW, and other mockery sites like NotAlwaysRight.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that the leftiesphere has gotten less smug over the years, though. The most you can say is that it's less influential. Still pretty self-satisfied.
Yup, my point was mainly focused on mainstream instances of this evolution, but /pol/ is/was clearly part of the avant-garde, along with other supposedly "trollbait" boards.
Meanwhile, FSTDT and LessWrong are more like... products of their time, which is kind of ironic considering LWers' delusions of prophethood. Between this slow slide into irrelevance and a repeated pattern of dramatic splits driven by egotistical figureheads erecting each other - and incidentally themselves - into strawmen, most people left the scene altogether. Those communities left behind were condemned to either be subsumed into a more fashionable school or thought (with varying levels of denial), or become the white dwarfs of the Internet, brooding about the divides of the past and shifting most of the blame for their own shortcomings on a convenient scapegoat (*cough*SJW*cough*) while slowly cooling off into complete lifelessness.
Though I may have heard about some people doing so in a desperate attempt to determine what went wrong with their own train of thought and how to fix it, so there's that.
EDIT: I'm gonna be honest, except for a brief stint of blame-the-SJWs-not-us following the elections, it really seems to me that FQA mostly got over its "bitterly reminisce about past infighting and target low-hanging fruit to distract from real threats and own increasing irrelevance and powerlessness against them" phase. I mean, there's even talks about merging back the The Website Formerly Known as Mainpage. Maybe we're already closing on the black dwarf stage, and it's not quite as barren and dreary as I thought it to be?
